Whiteout

by James Swallow

  "I gave MAC a set of search subroutines looking for anything similar to what you described, the same kinda kills that wasted Loengard. Looks like we got a hit."

  "Show me." The information rolled past, reflecting off the impassive gaze of Dredd's helmet. "Well, well. Scene of crime, Sector 88. Small world."

  The Tek-Judge brought up holos of four corpses, three human males and a blue-skinned Gagrantian. "Less than a day old, Dredd. Four deaders, cause of death, severe plasma-shot trauma." He made a face. "This is just a standard tag-and-bag. The report says they put it down to a local mob hit, didn't bother with a deep scan."

  "I need to see those corpses."

  Tyler jerked a thumb over his shoulder. "Then you better get to District Six Resyk pronto, Dredd. These bozos are scheduled for disposal. Today."

  In fact, the woman Dredd wanted to speak to more than anyone else in Mega-City One was only ten storeys above him, in a secluded office belonging to the Data Collection Bureau. Vedder removed the intrusion spike from her console and returned it to the concealed pocket in her uniform. The device was gene-encoded to her DNA and loaded with counter-measure programs of such complexity that no human hacker could ever have written them. She'd used it to save her life on dozens of occasions; resetting the locks on the gates of the Bifrost Bridge, opening doors in Cal Hab, escaping the Papal Inquisitors in Vatican City. The jobs she'd given the spike here had been ridiculously simple in comparison. First, ensuring that the droids in the Tek-Lab mistook her for Judge Tyler and destroyed the remains of the stealth truck, and now locking up the late Judge Loengard's autopsy report with a falsified hard drive crash. That stalling tactic would be followed up by an "accident" in the cryo-morgue when a cylinder of methalon would be mixed with a volatile cryogen fluid. Vedder would be well away from the Grand Hall of Justice by the time that happened, though. She had more loose ends to clean up at West 17 before she could return to her original task.

  The COE agent sighed, a rare show of emotion. She'd had things planned so precisely, or so it had seemed. Now, one random act of chance had thrown her entire operation into jeopardy and each step forward she took mired her deeper. Dredd was snapping at her heels, getting closer to piecing it together. Vedder hated admitting to herself that the old drokker was gaining ground. She was in real danger of exposing everything she had worked so hard to set in motion. The woman dallied with a brief moment of annoyance before smothering it. The mistake she'd made - easy to see it now, she fumed - was relying on actual criminals to create the traffic accident back on the Braga Skedway. Vedder had worked with local talent before, in operations like that Cassidium heist in Bruja City, and never had more than the usual discipline problems. But this time, the wrecker gang Vedder had cultivated and plied with hardware and guns turned out to be brash, overenthusiastic and above all, stupid.

  "Never send a punk to do a bitch's job," she gave voice to the thought, half-wondering what the DCB monitors would make of her talking to herself.

  Her console gave a soft bleep to attract her attention. She read the data intercept with mounting concern. Someone in Tek-Lab - she didn't have to guess that it was Dredd's playmate Tyler - had been digging in the MAC files. That alone wasn't a problem, because the second-rate little Luna-Tek would never be able to crack the encryption on the files he was looking at; no, Vedder's lip curled as she read the very same crime scene report that had set Dredd in motion ten floors below.

  "Where the drokk did this come from?" she snarled. She knew the pattern instantly. It was just what she had expected to see, only Dredd had got to it first. "That won't do." Vedder weighed her options; if she went after Dredd, she ran the risk that something vital would be leaked from West 17. That was something she couldn't allow; it was time to remove him from the equation. The agent shook her head and opened a secure line.

  "Vedder, ident code Five-Nine Reindeer Flotilla."

  "Confirmed," said a man's voice. "Protocol?"

  "Epsilon, variation three. Target and location feed on side-channel."

  A pause. "Confirmed," repeated the voice. "Timeframe?"

  "Immediate." Vedder snapped off the link and headed down to the bike park. With luck, Dredd would be dead by the time she got back.

  The corpses were already on the conveyor by the time Dredd reached the Resyk station. Like the core Resyk facility in MegCentral, the building was decorated in dark synthi-wood, resembling the shape of a gigantic mahogany coffin. Above the main entrance where recorded loops of angelic hymns played over and over, the motto that had made the body recycling franchise famous was displayed in tasteful holographic lettering; "We Recycle Everything But The Soul!" Inside there were grieving parlours and chapels of rest, memorial walls and votive shrines, but none of these were of interest to the lawman. He took the service entrance with his Lawmaster and skidded to a halt on the roller deck level where the foreman was waiting for him.

  "Keep those stiffs moving!" shouted the operator, frowning at Dredd's abrupt arrival. "Judge. Got your radio call. How can I help?"

  "You can start by turning off that belt!" Dredd snapped. "There are bodies on there with vital evidence."

  "No can do!" the foreman insisted. "Look at that lot! We're one of the largest Resyk sub-stations in the city, we process more than eleven thousand corpses a day at maximum capacity. I can't afford to let them pile up on the grinders!" He waved a hand at the rubbereen conveyor. As broad as three lanes of megway, the belt was dutifully hauling naked corpses from the drop chute down to the primary flesh-grinding wheels at the far end of the platform. Dredd could hear the whickering clatter of the eyeball gougers and de-teething grabs working away beyond them. He knew the layout of these places too well; years earlier he'd found himself fighting the escaped criminal Fink Angel at Resyk Central, stalking the killer through knee-deep floods of meat slurry and liquefied body matter. The disposal centres served a vital purpose for Mega-City One's energy and resource-hungry populace, turning the dead into chemical reclaim for reprocessing. If you wanted a dirt burial in MC-1, you had to be richer than most citizens could ever dream of.

  "I said," Dredd snarled, "shut it down!" He drew his Lawgiver and sent a single standard execution round into the control nest across the bay. The shot was pinpoint, shattering the emergency override command panel. In response, alarms sounded through the air and the conveyor belt shuddered to a halt. Without waiting for permission, Dredd vaulted over the safety barrier and sprinted across the static belt. Dead eyes stared up at him from the old and the young as he passed.

  He found his quarry straight away; Gagarantians like the alien thug Hoog were close enough to Terran for Resyk's tender mercies, but his bright blue skin stood out among the human tones like a beacon. Dredd activated the skin-sensor that Tyler had armed him with and turned the device on the body. There was a commotion going on where the foreman was standing and yelling, but his voice was lost in the sirens.

  The sensor blinked green and Dredd stood up, scanning the corpses for the bodies of the Clent brothers. He found them, the two dead twins unceremoniously pinned beneath the cadaver of a huge Fatty. The Judge looked up and gestured to a figure on the overhead crane gantry. He'd need to get the porcine corpse moved to get readings on the Clents' wounds.

  The gantry moved closer and Dredd shouted: "Down here! Get the claw grab!" The words had hardly left his mouth when he realised that the figure on the gantry wasn't wearing Resyk uniform; it was sheathed in a black stealth suit with a glowing blue flash visor.

  The Judge threw himself to one side as the crane grab was released, the five-ton claw falling toward him like the talon of a giant predator.

  TARGETS OF OPPORTUNITY

  The claw struck the rubbereen conveyor with such force that the impact tossed Dredd away like a leaf in a breeze. The Judge landed unceremoniously amid a knot of dead eldsters, the day's intake of passings from the Crock Blocks on Northside. The grab flattened the corpulent corpse of the Fatty and the remains of the Clent brothers into fleshy paste
. Any evidence they represented was now contaminated and worthless.

  The sirens were still braying, and Dredd realised too late that the noise had conveniently masked the sound of gunfire from the service platform. He saw other black-suited figures dispatching any Resyk workers too slow to run, killing them with single shots to the head. Whoever they were, they were a professional crew.

  Dredd considered selecting a heatseeker round on his pistol, but thought better of it. The bodysuits the killers wore were likely to be thermosealed, and a random hotshot round could find itself looking for a different target, maybe even a civilian. Refusing to stay on the defensive, Dredd vaulted up from where he had fallen and threw himself aside, just as the hiss of bullets snapped at the corpses around him. He returned fire with blinding speed, thumbing the selector to armour piercing. The tungsten-tipped penetrator rounds missed their human target by inches, cutting hot flares of sparks from the crane gantry's framework.

  Another salvo of shots came at him from his attacker; Dredd recognised the sound of a spit carbine over the din of the klaxons. He dodged and ran. There was nowhere to hide on the conveyor, and like Hoog's bright blue corpse, Dredd stood out like a sore thumb among the naked dead. He executed a tuck-and-roll off the springy belt surface and fired back. A single Hi-Ex round might have been enough to silence the shooter permanently, but that wouldn't leave anything to interrogate. Dredd wanted one of these creeps alive - or at least alive enough to be sweated by him in an interrogation cube.

  Then, all at once, one of the black suits woke up to where Dredd was, and suddenly the conveyor was moving again, accelerating beyond the normal slow-walk speed to a fast jog. The spiked maws of the grinders loomed large. The Judge sprinted in the opposite direction, gaining a little headway. The figure on the gantry waved at one of its cohorts in the service bay, hunched over the speed controls. Dredd knew what would come next.

  A vibration undulated through the conveyor and it tripled in speed; the Judge was running all out, legs pumping, just to stay in place. On the gantry, the dark assassin emerged with a weapon in his hands, stepping up to take a careful aim. One round through Dredd's leg would be enough to drop him, and the Judge would never be able to get up before the grinders claimed him.

  "Bike!" Dredd snapped. "Weapons free! Go!"

  The attackers had made the mistake of ignoring Dredd's idling Lawmaster where it stood on the platform. The Judge's command brought the machine to life, turning over control to the motorcycle's on-board computer systems. Lawmaster CPUs were about as smart as a typical Bot-Cab or RoboHauler, but unlike their civilian cousins, they were armed with twin bike cannons and a high-energy laser. The computer was intelligent enough to follow limited commands and programmed to recognise - and neutralise - armed threats. The clatter of heavy weapons fire distracted the shooter on the gantry, giving Dredd the moment he needed. He tore a small pistol-grip device from a pouch on his gear belt and aimed it up, ignoring the exertion of fighting the belt. With a whistle, the device spat a wickedly barbed dart into the air, trailing a hair-thin monofilament wire. Dredd's aim was true, and the titanium arrow caught the gunman in the chest. On impact, the dart splayed open, lodging in place in the soft meat of his heart.

  Dredd thumbed a switch on the hand line and powerful micromotors lifted him off the speeding belt, up towards the crane. The assassin clutched at his chest, coughing up blood, and shredding his gloves trying to clasp the molecule-thin wire. The Judge was halfway to him when the shooter's life signs dropped below the survival threshold. As the black-suited killer choked out his last breath, a thermolite charge sewn into the collar of his combat gear ignited; the detonation reduced his body to a wet paste and blew the gantry off its rails. The crane tumbled down on to the conveyor, and Dredd went with it, flipped around and caught it like a fish on a lure.

  The falling crane tore open the belt and wedged in the thrashing gears below with an ear-splitting shriek of tortured metal. Dredd struck the rubbereen belt again and bounced across it like a stone skipping on water. The conveyor snapped and recoiled, writhing into breaking waves against a steel shoreline. Bodies of all shapes and sizes were flung into the air in a mad aerial ballet of nude, pallid flesh.

  The Judge landed hard, feeling ribs snap on touchdown; but then he was buried under a rain of falling corpses and blackness engulfed him.

  As always, her complaints to Bendy fell on deaf ears. "But I've been on for a whole shift and a half, and now you want me to cover for Chewlyp?" Jayni jerked her thumb at the dancer, who scowled back at her through her mass of Pugly make-up and facial piercings.

  Bendy - to this day Jayni had never understood why someone so fat and so inflexible had ever earned a nickname like that - gave her a gimlet eye and rolled the suckstik in his mouth around with a clatter of brown teeth. "Fine, woman, you don't want the work, that's fine. There's plenty of girlflesh queuing up out there to work in a joint as fine as this."

  Jayni sagged with the weight of frustration at having exactly the same conversation that she'd shared with the tubby prick every time this situation came up. Even as she loathed herself for doing it, she found herself sleepwalking her way though her part in the little performance. "This place? Shuggy and tits is all you have to offer here, Bendy. It's not the snecking Kandy Klub!"

  And right on cue he tugged the suckstik out of his mouth and waved it in her face, blobs of his spittle flying in the air from the masticated end. "Cover for Chewlyp or sneck off and don't come back. There it is, Jayni. Do or don't."

  She glanced around for support to Ashtré and Latreena, but predictably got nothing but blank-eyed stares in reply. "Fine," she spat. "Thanks for being such a sport about it, boss."

  Bendy was already on his way to the back office with Chewlyp wandering ahead of him, trailing a reeking cloud of Otto Sump's Putrefaction - For Women. He didn't bother to thank her, just made an absent wave of the hand while his other meaty paw went on a quest toward the Pugly girl's pimply backside.

  "Wass he see inna?" Ashtré snapped in her clipped MegEast accent, as soon as he was out of earshot. "Pugly ugly issout. Un-stylee."

  "Bendy's lucky if he can get a little," Latreena chimed in, returning to the important business of oiling her breasts. "Chewlyp gets tha fringe benefits." She eyed Jayni. "Maybe you should-"

  "Stop right there," Jayni made a halt sign with her hand, like a Judge at a traffic intersection. "I got a guy. One that ain't like Two-Ton Tony Tubbs's little brother."

  "Wahlike? Ya man Wess?" Ashtré flipped her lanky tresses. "Dint you dump his loserness?"

  "Yeah," Latreena added, warming to the subject. "That little spug ain't never amounted to anything, Jayni. Cut him loose, find something better."

  Jayni kicked off her street shoes and forced her feet into the monstrous high heels the dancers had to wear on the podium. "What, here? Oh, 'cos there's hundreds of snecking Prince Charmings out there!" She stabbed an accusing finger out toward where the club floor lay. "Wess has got... He's..." Her voice trailed off as she groped for an answer that wasn't an outright lie. Ashtré let out a snigger and Jayni gave her the finger in return. With a fierce tug, she pulled off her top and stalked out of the dressing room.

  "Girl got no ambition," Latreena noted, wiping her hand on a dirty towel. She drew a drug-case from inside her v-string. "Wanna hit of some zzip?"

  Mercifully, the pounding rhythms of a rastabilly skank number started up in time to block put the groaning from Bendy's office.

  At first he had been terrified.

  The feeling of it, the sensation of something metallic and powerful invading his body, was overwhelming. Wess lay there, unable to scream, red with the effort of it, every nerve in his body on fire. The gun changed him, by degrees merging parts of its matrix into the pliant, yielding flesh of his hand. Smyth saw it happen. He wanted to look away, but he couldn't. It was sickening and it was grotesque, but still he watched the alteration of his muscle and bone as the weapon melted into his forearm like a stone sinking i
nto syrup. Wet processor fluids sluiced from his pores, sticky and thick with mucus. The nanofibres in his bloodstream were fever hot, filling the cramped kitchen space with a singed organic scent, like burning hair. His little finger shrivelled up and merged into his palm, the calcites and collagen in the bones melting and shifting to feed the needs of the gun.

  It told him it needed minerals, and it gave him strange cravings that set Wess stumbling back into the apartment, where he swallowed mouthfuls of dry earth from Jayni's plant pots and chemical cocktails of cleaning fluids for a chaser. He wept silently, screamed noiselessly. The pain was the worst experience of his life, a million rotting toothaches, a million head-splitting hangovers, a million stomach-knotting nauseas.

  Eventually, he could stand again. The shakes began to subside, little by little, until his vision wasn't hazed anymore and each breath was regular, not a ragged wheezy gasp. Smyth's joints were hot to the touch, and sweat sluiced from him. The pistol told him this was to be expected. It was all part of the merge process.

  It didn't occur to Wess to question it. It was part of him now. He couldn't lie to it in the same way he could to himself. It was... It was like Jayni that way.

  The nanodes were still swarming inside the optical jelly of his eyeballs, but Smyth could see the wall clock clearly enough. It was way past Jayni's quitting time now and still she wasn't home. In the depths of the pain, Wess had half-hoped she would come and find him, rescue him from the agony; but she was never there.

  He washed off the crusted mucus and took up his radorak from where he'd dropped it, and with the last of the money he still had on him, Wess took a Bot-Cab to Bendy's place.

  Jayni was on stage when he stepped through the door, and the sight of her up there, her face in a blank mask of fake allure, made him tense. His focus was so intense that he didn't even notice that the weapons detector over the entrance failed to sound as he passed through it.